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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training

Foreign Affairs Oral History Project

Information Series

AMBASSADOR JOHN W. SHIRLEY

Interviewed by: G. Lewis Schmidt

Initial interview date: November 21, 1989

Copyright 1998 ADST

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Early years in Yugoslavia and Hungary during WWII

Nazi Occupation

Zagreb – USIA 1957-1959

JOT

Belgrade 1959

Assistant Cultural Affairs Officer

Trieste 1960

Assistant Branch PAO

Branch PAO

Bi-national centers

Rome 1963

Press Attaché

Reaction to Kennedy Assassination

USIS Activities

Role of USIS in promoting “Opening to the Left”

New Delhi 1965

Press Attaché

Baptism of Fire: Outbreak of Indo-Pakistan War

Relationship with Ambassador Chester Bowles

Indian Tendency to Moralize and Criticize America

Effectiveness and values of USIS Indian program

Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva

Washington, DC 1969

Various positions in Near East

South Asia Area Office

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Poland 1970

PAO

Value of USIS/VOA work in Poland

Washington, DC 1971

Deputy Area Director for Eastern Europe

Area Director

Director of Recombines East and West Europe

Italy 1976

PAO

USIS blocks US support for Communist Participation in Gov.

PAO as political counselor

Washington, DC 1980

Associate Director for Programs

Acting Director of USIA

Charles Wick

Politicization of USIA

Need for restructuring

Agency Deputy Director and Interim

Diplomat-In-Residence – Wesleyan University 1983

Ambassador to Tanzania 1983

Experiences

INTERVIEW

Biographic Outline; Early Years in Yugoslavia And Hungary During WWII - Nazi

Occupation

Q: Jock, I'm not going to talk much. I just want you to give us a few remarks about your

background and your education, how it was that you got into the Service in the first

place, and what motivated you to do so. From that point, we'll simply go sequentially into

your various assignments and we'll cover various points there. So will you pick up from

here and start out with your background and your reasons for getting into USIA work?

SHIRLEY: I will preface talking about my background by telling the listener that Lew

Schmidt, who is interviewing me today, presided over the panel which determined

whether or not I was to enter the Foreign Service. Since he presumably voted in favor of

allowing me in he is responsible in part for any subsequent mischief I may have done.

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To tell you how I first became interested in the Service I have to go back to 1939. I was a

boy of eight, and my father and I sailed on his boat up the Adriatic, eventually ending up

in Split. We were there at the beginning of World War II. I lived in Yugoslavia for two

years, went to a boarding school in Zagreb, and got my first taste of life in Eastern

Europe. When the Germans occupied Yugoslavia in 1941, my father and I attempted to

return to the United States. For a series of complicated reasons we got no further than

Hungary, where we still were at the outbreak of the U.S.-Japanese war.

You'll remember that Japan attacked us on December 7, and four days later, on December

11, 1941, Germany declared war on the United States. After that, we were no longer able

to leave Hungary, so I spent the entire war there, mostly in a very good boarding school. I

experienced the German occupation of Hungary -- a vicious period in Hungarian history -

- and experienced also the siege of Budapest, the Soviet conquest of Budapest, and about

nine months of the Soviet occupation of Hungary.

I witnessed things during the last months of the war and particularly during the Soviet

occupation, which marked me for life. By the age of 14 I was determined to spend my life

doing whatever little I could to reverse the process which the Russians launched in 1944.

That is shorthand for wanting to fight communism.

There followed another year of Eastern European life in Czechoslovakia.

In 1946 I returned to the United States and went to military academy, as most of my

family had done before me. By then I had already decided that I wanted to go into the

Foreign Service or become a professional soldier.

Towards the end of my last year at military school, I decided that the Foreign Service was

it. I went to the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, subsequently entered

the Air Force, and served for four years in Germany and Austria in an intelligence unit

where most of my work was directed at Hungary--I'm almost bilingual in Hungarian--and

East Germany.

Entry Into USIA, 1957-1958--Almost Immediately Assigned To Zagreb

As Junior Officer Trainee (JOT)

Toward the end of my Air Force years I met Jack Stewart who at that time was with the

Munich Radio Center. Jack, to whom I used to take illegal border crossers to be

interviewed for the Voice, wrote a letter to Barry Zorthian. When I returned to

Washington, Barry passed me on to Henry Loomis who hired me as a GS-7 in IRI, the

acronym for our Research Office at the time. Shortly thereafter I took the Foreign Service

exam and, thanks to Lew Schmidt, came on board as a JOT in March 1958.

I'll back up to say that I initially came into IRI as a contract employee immediately after

the Hungarian uprising of October - November 1956, and that my first duty was to

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translate all of the tapes of the Hungarian Service of the VOA for an investigation which

was being conducted by a congressional committee to see whether VOA had in any way

encouraged the Hungarian freedom fighters to believe that we were going to support

them. The committee found the Hungarian Service innocent of the charge.

Q: This was either late in 1956 or early '57.

SHIRLEY: We are now in '57. I took the Foreign Service exam in November, 1957, and I

was sworn in on March 15, 1958.

Q: At that time, USIA had come into existence as USIA, so you were sworn into the U.S.

Information Agency at that point.

SHIRLEY: Yes, I was. I was in the eleventh JOT class, and I requested an assignment to

Eastern Europe, specifically to Zagreb. I received the assignment and reported to my post

in July, 1958. I remained in Zagreb for one year.

It was a very satisfying year. I was thrilled with my responsibilities, anxious, as I suppose

everyone is, to do as well as I possibly could. And I had an exceptional opportunity to do

so because the gentleman who was BPAO was not notably active and frequently ill. More

often than not, I was in charge of the post.

Q: Who was your RAO at the time? Or do you prefer not to put that on tape?

SHIRLEY: Is the recorder on or off?

Q: It's on now.

SHIRLEY: Please switch it off. [Tape recorder turned off]

No, he wasn't a terribly active man, so I was often in charge, but even when I wasn't, I

was able to do a lot more than most JOTs are allowed to do.

I remember one particular incident which I'll tell you about. Louis Armstrong came to

Yugoslavia in late 1958 or early 1959. It was the first time that any American jazz

musician had been anywhere in Eastern Europe. Armstrong was flying from Le Bourget

to Zagreb for a concert in Ljubljana that evening. His plane was delayed. There was

something wrong with the runway lights at the Zagreb airport and they weren't going to

let the plane land. I then spent an hour or more persuading the Zagreb department of

roads to provide those little smudge pots they put on roads at night. We lined the runway

with the smudge pots, and Louis Armstrong landed. At the end of that long day I felt that

I had earned my salary!

1959: Assistant Cultural Affairs Officer (CAO) Belgrade

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When my JOT year in Zagreb was over, Heath Bowman, who was Country PAO, asked

me to come down to Belgrade to replace Phil Arnold, as Assistant CAO and an Exhibits

Officer. I happily accepted because I had already come to have enormous respect for

Heath, who, in many ways, was the most professional PAO I ever worked for, but also

with some feeling of trepidation, because I knew nothing about exhibits. I felt ready to

make foreign policy decisions, but I wasn't quite ready to build exhibits!

My year in Belgrade -- mid-1959 to September of 1960 -- was a happy one. It was a

splendidly exciting time to be in Yugoslavia. Everything we did, from a small window

exhibit to a pavilion-sized show was seen by tens of thousands of people. We were a

window on America, a window on the world.

Q: I'd like to ask a couple of questions now, partly going back to Zagreb, but also getting

into Yugoslavia. First of all, what was the nature of your effort in Zagreb? Was there

something in particular that you were aiming at, or were you just taking events as they

came along, running a standard USIS program?

SHIRLEY: I arrived in Zagreb thinking that I was going to be trained, but I didn't get

much of that. I was initially assigned specific projects. Fairly soon, perhaps after two or

three months, I was engaged mainly in picking up the pieces dropped by the BPAO and in

running the post. Towards the end, things got awkward, particularly when Heath Bowman

began communicating with me directly instead of going through the BPAO.

I remember that the first thing I was required to do was to write a report on Zagreb's

English-teaching program, which ten years later I would have considered an

excruciatingly boring task, but which at the time I thought was splendidly stimulating.

No, Zagreb was a good time.

Being Exhibits Officer in Belgrade was intimidating. The only talent I brought to the job

was good taste, which Heath said I had. Did I find it satisfying? Yes, I did, for the reason

I mentioned to you before. People were so hungry for anything Western, and particularly

American. Attendance at exhibits was huge and perhaps with the exception of the Voice

of America, the tool through which we could reach the largest number of Yugoslavs.

Money spent on exhibits in Yugoslavia was money well spent.

Q: This, of course, was some years after Tito had broken with the Soviet Union. And I

wondered what kind of experience you had in Yugoslavia with reference to the attitude of

the people toward America. You said they were extremely interested in learning things

about the United States. Was there any overcast or overtone of antipathy toward the U.S.,

or was it basically an open feeling about the Americans?

SHIRLEY: People who have experienced communism like Americans, because to them

Americans are the antithesis of communism. Yugoslavs had certainly experienced

communism in an extreme form between 1944 and the break with the Cominform in

1948. Tito gradually loosened the screws, and by the time I got there in 1958, ten years

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after the break with the Cominform, things had eased considerably, but the system was

still communist, indeed it still is today, 35 years later.

Almost everybody in Yugoslavia had an uncle or a cousin or an aunt in the United States.

People were conspicuously friendly to Americans. It's always easy to be an American in a

communist country because the population looked to us as their only real source of hope.

Q: I gather, however, that the government still had its suspicions, and I base this on a

very limited experience. When I was in the War College, since I had never been to

Europe, I elected to take the European trip. They always broke the War College into four

or five groups and visited different regions. I chose Europe, and that was the one year we

went both to Soviet Union and to Yugoslavia.

Although the people seemed friendly enough, and the army seemed especially friendly

and very critical of the Soviet Union; nevertheless, we were watched. We were stopping

with a group of about 30 or 35 of us as part of a War College group, and we were there

at the official invitation of the Yugoslav government. Nevertheless, I could see the

gumshoes sitting across from me in the hotel lobby and watching me. There were several

instances indicating that we were being watched. So I just wondered. That apparently

was a governmental activity and had nothing to do with the general feeling.

SHIRLEY: Yes. But in the late 1950s, I cannot say that I ever felt that I was under

personal surveillance, certainly not constant surveillance.

Q: I think this was occasional, but . . .

SHIRLEY: I did not experience constant surveillance, as I did during periods of service in

Poland much later on. If I had had an affair with a Yugoslav girl, or if I had been drinking

too much, something of that kind, they probably would have come at me to see whether I

could be blackmailed. But I had no such experience.

Q: I know that you speak a great number of languages, an unusually large number. Did

you pick up your Serbo-Croatian initially during your period of residence in the country,

or did you study it and gain most of it thereafter?

SHIRLEY: By the time I came into the Foreign Service, I spoke French, German,

Hungarian, and Serbo-Croatian. I had lost a lot of my Serbo Croatian, but it came back to

me fairly fast. Within about 90 days, 120 days, I was probably speaking at the three-plus,

three-plus level. I subsequently learned Italian and Polish, so I guess that makes a total of

six. But McKinney Russell is the Agency's great linguist. I was merely a polyglot.

Q: I'm curious, and if you don't mind, what was your father doing in Eastern Europe at

the time that the war began?

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SHIRLEY: My father was and, thank goodness, remains, an eccentric American who was

living on his boat in Split. He fell in love with the Czech wife of a White Russian emigre

at the beginning of the war.

Q: That's an interesting reason and no doubt a very satisfying one for one individual, at

least.

SHIRLEY: No. It was a disaster. He caught up with the lady after the war, married her,

spent a perfectly miserable six or seven years with her, and then divorced her.

I would like to add that I have worked for PAOs whom I have greatly admired, and I don't

want to pick out a single one as the best. But Heath Bowman, who was never appreciated

in the Service as he should have been, was an extraordinarily effective officer and to have

worked for him was an immensely valuable experience. He was intelligent, methodical,

strict and sometimes irascible. I learned much from Heath. Most of all high standards. He

was exacting and he expected people to work at their best all the time. That spirit I

subsequently tried to adopt myself, and to inculcate in others who have worked for me.

Q: You said you had this one final comment to make.

SHIRLEY: That was it.

Q: My question was that you were in Belgrade handling the exhibits program. Did you

ever have the Atoms for Peace exhibit?

SHIRLEY: No.

Q: Well, it would have been that time, because that was the period from about '55 to '58

that the Atoms for Peace exhibit was being shown very widely around the world.

Well, were did you go then from there? Is that when you went to Trieste?

1960: Trieste, As Assistant Branch PAO, Ultimately To Branch PAO. Creates Binational

Centers In Several Posts Otherwise Slated For Closing

SHIRLEY: Yes. I went to Trieste in September, 1960. Eddie Pancoast was PAO and I

reported to him as his Assistant PAO. I was with Eddie for about a year when he was

replaced by another person who stayed for less than a year. I was promoted Branch PAO

on the second officer's departure.

Trieste was my first independent command. Even if I was only the skipper of a torpedo

boat instead of a destroyer or a cruiser, it was a very good feeling, being skipper. For the

first time in my career I had the opportunity to put some of my own ideas to work.

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Toward the end of my tour in Trieste, Joe Phillips, the CPAO, called me up and said that

the Agency was going through one of its periodic cutting exercises and that one of the

posts to be closed was Trieste. I told him that I would like time to reflect for a day or two

about what might be done. I called back to say that I thought that I could put together an

Italo-American Association which would be self-funding, and I recommended that the

senior national employee in Trieste be kept on the payroll. Joe liked the idea and asked

me to create a formula that could be used country-wide since Turin, Genoa, Florence and

Palermo were destined for the same fate as Trieste. I came up both with a plan for Trieste

and with a proposal on how to save the other posts as well.

The experience of putting together a binational association and setting up a series of

English courses to fund the activity was great. The Association still exists, 30-some years

later.

In general, the Trieste PAO experience was a good one. It gave me an opportunity to

plumb my depths. It put me in a position to learn a great deal about Italy. I was Acting

Principal Officer from time to time, so I also learned something about that end of the

business. And I wasn't just PAO for the Trieste Consular District, I had the Venice

Consular District as well. Apart from the pleasure of working in Venice, I also gained an

insight into Venetian society, Venetian culture, and that of the surrounding cities.

1963: Rome As Press Attaché

In 1963, after I had completed three years in Trieste, Ambassador Reinhardt came for a

visit. I wrote some speeches for him and ran his schedule. He asked that I come down to

Rome in some capacity or other. Joe Phillips arranged this with the Agency, and I went to

Rome as Assistant Press and Publications Officer.

Six weeks or so after my arrival in Rome, Bob Amerson, the Press Attaché, was

transferred to Bogota as PAO. The Agency was going to send in somebody else as press

attaché, but Joe and the Ambassador decided that I should take the job, and they

prevailed.

In that Press Attaché job I felt that I was riding a whirl- wind because it was a senior job

and I had been precipitated into it very early in my career. At that point I was an FSR 5 or

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two grades below the established rank for the assignment. But it worked out, and of my

USIA experiences, I think the two most satisfying were being press attaché in Rome, and

later in New Delhi.

Q: As the press attaché, you were the Embassy spokesman then?

A. Italian Reaction To Kennedy Assassination

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SHIRLEY: Yes. I was the Embassy spokesman. I was the Ambassador's speech writer.

When the Ambassador's aide was not there, I was often asked to fill in.

Let me tell you a story. Everyone remembers where he was when he learned that

President Kennedy had been assassinated. On the day the President was killed, the

Ambassador had to fly to Padua to make a speech. His aide was out of town, so I was

doubling in brass. We flew up to Padua in a military plane. He made his speech, and we

were flying back when the radio in the cockpit -- about two feet from our seats --

crackled. The copilot turned around and waived me forward. I put on the earphones and

the Minister, Francis Williamson, said, "Please tell the Ambassador that the President has

been shot and is dying." I turned, but before I could say anything the radio came on again.

I put the earphones back on, and Francis Williamson said, "Say that the President has

been assassinated. He is dead."

We landed at the military airport in Rome in the midst of a crowd; half the Embassy was

there. I stayed up all night writing my first full-length speech for Ambassador Reinhardt:

It was a eulogy to President Kennedy.

Q: I presume, as in most countries it was true, that the Italians were emotionally

overcome, also, and expressed great feelings about the death of the president. Or was it

not so?

SHIRLEY: You know, Lew, it was the most extraordinary outpouring of grief that I have

ever seen. President Kennedy was loved by the Italian people, perhaps for some of the

wrong reasons. They loved him because he was young and good-looking, because he was

virile and had a pretty wife. The Kennedy myth persists in Italy. Only a couple of years

ago, people would ask me when Senator Edward Kennedy would become president.

When I explained that he had no chance at all, Italians were unbelieving.

But back to your question. The day after the President was assassinated, I was sitting in

my office working the telephones. A man called and my secretary said: "You must talk to

this person." Hundreds of people were calling, and one couldn't talk to them all, but this

one she said, I had to. The man came on the line and said, "I want to tell you how sorry I

am about the assassination of your president." I thanked him and wondered why his call

had got through. But he continued: "There is something else I want to tell you. I have

never seen President Kennedy because I am blind, but I stood on the street when

President Kennedy passed by in his motorcade when he visited Rome, and I felt him." By

then I could hardly speak.

Q: While you were still in Italy, did the film "Years of Lightning, Day of Drums" come to

Italy for showing?

SHIRLEY: I can't remember.

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Q: Because that was a film which reduced practically every foreign audience that I was

with when they saw it to tears.

SHIRLEY: Yes. I saw the film a couple years later, in New Delhi with an Indian

audience, and you're absolutely right. It was the most moving film the Agency ever made,

perhaps the best film the Agency ever made.

Q: Do you know who made it?

SHIRLEY: Yes. Wasn't it Bruce--

Q: Bruce Herschensohn.

SHIRLEY: Bruce Herschensohn made it, yes.

Q: What would you say were the major accomplishments during your period in Italy of

the USIS program? Or don't any of them stand out as particular highlights?

B. Doubts About Continuation Of Some Long Standing USIS Activities In Italy

SHIRLEY: I had some doubts then, as I did subsequently when I was CPAO in Rome,

about the effectiveness of a number of our programs. I thought that even then, and I'm

taking you back to 1963, there were programs which should already have been eliminated

and which were pretty expensive. We were not as bureaucratic then as I think we have

become in the intervening years, but it still took a while to stop doing the things that were

undoubtedly useful in the '40s, and perhaps in the early '50s, when a magazine produced

by us was a rare treasure. By the mid-1960s, the people we were sending our publications

to were already suffering from information overload and hardly looked at what we sent.

Q: You said that Joe Phillips was the PAO when you went to Rome. Did he stay during

all the time you were there, or did you get a new PAO?

SHIRLEY: The PAOs during my tenure were Mickey Boerner, then Joe Phillips for most

of my tenure in Rome, and finally Gordon Ewing.

If I look back over a more than 30-year career in USIA, and if you asked me to name of

the person for whom I had the greatest personal affection, it would be Joe Phillips;

because of his grace, because of his manners, because of his style, and because of his

substance. Gordon Ewing and I also became close friends, but Joe was much older than I

and something of a father figure. He was also a very comprehending, experienced and

sympathetic chief.

Q: And who were the Deputy PAOs when you were in Italy, particularly when you were

in Rome?

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SHIRLEY: Ed Schechter was the Deputy PAO for a good part of the time, a man whose

Central European origins -- he is Viennese, as you perhaps remember -- made him

particularly good company to me. I listened carefully to what he said, and minded not at

all taking direction from him.

I forget the next person to come along, perhaps because he was so forgettable.

Q: Was that by any chance Dick Salvatierra?

SHIRLEY: Yes, it was.

Q: Dick felt he was out of place in Rome. He was essentially a Latino by persuasion and

experience, and I don't think he ever felt at home in the Roman situation.

SHIRLEY: I would have to agree with your judgment that he was not comfortable in

Rome. I don't think he particularly liked Italians. I don't think he liked being in a huge

embassy, and I don't think he liked me. He didn't like the way I spoke, and there was

something about me and my manner he found off-putting. The period between Joe's

departure and Gordon's arrival was not a happy one for me. Come to think of it, he gave

me the only negative efficiency report I ever had. Perhaps that's another reason why my

memory of him is not so hot. [Laughter]

C. Role Of USIS (Through Ed Schechter) In The 1963 Effort To Promote

An Opening To The Left

Q: I don't think we fully covered the question of whether you thought there was any

outstanding accomplishment or program in USIS during your period in Italy. If you don't,

or whether you do or not, I'd also like to ask you a question. Ed Schechter is very proud

of the role that he played in the attempts of the embassy to further the opening to the left

in Italy. Did you have any part in that, or what was your opinion of that effort?

SHIRLEY: No, I did not. I did not because I was too junior and because nobody was

asking my opinion about the opening to the left. I had an opinion which was, and is,

immaterial in terms of what happened. Ed was very sophisticated about Italian politics.

He had a wide-ranging group of contacts--to use one of our favorite words--among

important people. His Italian was excellent, even though he spoke it with a heavy German

accent through a pipe.

He was very effective in carrying the Embassy's message to the press, and to a lot of

Italian political figures, as well. So if it is his judgment that he had an influence, I would

take him at his word and I would certainly concur in that judgement.

Q: Do you, at this point, have any further comments and suggestions or observations

about your experience in the Italian program?

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SHIRLEY: Not really. I probably will have some things to say when I get to my tenure in

Rome as Country PAO, but you're about 12 years away from that, I'm afraid.

Press Attaché, New Delhi 1965

Q: Okay. Well, let's go on to your next assignment then. Was that your New Delhi

assignment?

SHIRLEY: Yes, it was.

Q: What year was that?

SHIRLEY: We're now in the summer of 1965, the early summer of 1965. I was already

assigned to the Armed Forces Staff College, but Ambassador Bowles wanted an

experienced press attaché, and there were not that many in the Agency at the time. So

instead of Norfolk, I went to New Delhi.

I came back to Washington in July of 1965. Ambassador Bowles happened to be in town

and I called on him to be looked over. He was a person whose name I had known for

many years. He had been Deputy Secretary of State, or Under Secretary as it then was

called, in the first year of the Kennedy Administration, and then Ambassador-at-Large,

and then he went back to India as ambassador for a second time.

He was an awesome figure for a young officer suddenly to be confronted with, and I

arrived at Ambassador Bowles' house in Washington--a friend's house, actually--to find

the Ambassador and Mrs. Bowles there, Mrs. Bowles wearing a sari, as she almost always

did. Bowles said: "We'll try you out. We have six or seven Indian journalists arriving in a

few minutes, and I'd like you to run the press conference."

A: Baptism Of Fire: Outbreak Of Indo-Pakistan War

I apparently passed the test and was told to get to Delhi as quickly as I could. I arrived in

Delhi, and I remember being met by my colleague, Merrill Miller. Merrill took us to our

hotel, which was the Delhi Claridge, not London Claridge, I'm sorry to say. I went to bed

at about 4:00 in the morning -- planes in Delhi always arrive at that time. Two hours later,

I got a call to report to the Embassy. A car fetched me, and off I went. When I arrived, I

was told to report to the Ambassador's office where we learned that Indian and Pakistani

forces had clashed in the Punjab and that there was a war on. Would I please get to work?

I had a glimmering of where the Punjab was, and I knew that Indians and Pakistanis did

not get on particularly well. Happily, my grandfather -- I have an English mother and her

father was a career officer in the British Army -- had spent 20 years in India, and I had

been brought up by him until I was six. I was steeped in the lore of British India, but it

was Mr. Kipling's India, not Mr. Nehru's. Still it got me by the first weeks, and I did know

quite a lot about the military situation which fascinated me.

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Within 24 hours we had 50 American correspondents on the ground, and within 48 hours

perhaps 75 or 80. I did a morning briefing and afternoon briefing, always after consulting

with the Defense Attaché, with the Ambassador, with the DCM, and with the Political

Counselor, trying quickly to learn what was going on and working out how to say it

without getting the Embassy creamed by the Indians who weren't telling anyone anything.

I worked harder and with greater pleasure and more enthusiasm than I ever had in my life

before. It was a glorious week or ten days of really being engaged and very quickly

getting to know my way around.

B: Happy Relationship With Ambassador Chester Bowles

If you should ask me--which you haven't--which tour I considered my best tour

professionally, at which stage I performed the most efficiently, at which stage I found my

work the most satisfying, and at which stage in my life I had the greatest chief, I would

pick those three years in India with Chester Bowles.

It's curious in life how one sometimes has chemistry with a person, even if one has very

different views of the world. Chester Bowles was a liberal's liberal, and I was a

prototypical Tory, but we got on famously.

There were some interesting people on Ambassador Bowles' personal staff. Dick Celeste,

who is now Governor of Ohio, was his aide. Doug Bennet, who is now president of

National Public Radio, formerly Director of AID, formerly Assistant Secretary for

Congressional Relations, was his principal speechwriter, although Doug left shortly after

I arrived when I took on that responsibility.

You know, press attachés do not, as a rule, make their careers by disagreeing with the

chief of mission, or by arguing in a senior staff meeting, arguing against something which

an ambassador proposes. But Chester Bowles always encouraged me to do just that, and

always listened, even when I was speaking nonsense. He also taught me whatever I know

about writing. You'll remember that Chester Bowles and Bill Benton were the founders of

Benton and Bowles, and that they practically invented market research. And Ambassador

Bowles knew how to write. Initially, it was a terrifying experience to write for him, but I

learned how to let myself into his mind. By the middle of my three-year tour, I was able

to write for him things which he changed very little. What he changed always made it

more felicitous, but in the main he let stand what I put before him. I also had the

opportunity in Delhi to be Staff Aide for quite long periods when I would be both Staff

Aide and Press Attaché. It was a fine opportunity to get an overview of the work of an

embassy, to understand the responsibilities of an ambassador, and to learn what a

diplomatic mission could and could not do. The experience served me extremely well in

later years.

When I was a chief of mission myself, I thought back on those early years in the Foreign

Service and on the lessons learned from Chester Bowles. We became close personal

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friends. Our house in Connecticut is only a 20-minute drive from his, so I continued to

see him after he retired. When he retired, he asked me to leave the Service and do a

column with him, but I couldn't afford it. I'm sorry we didn't have that experience

together. There was so much more that I could have learned from him, but he was already

in bad health and perhaps it would not have worked.

I might add about my Delhi experience that Bill Miller was PAO. There are so many Bill

Millers, but I refer to Delhi Bill Miller.

Q: One of them has died. Bombay Bill Miller died.

SHIRLEY: Yes, I heard that. Delhi Bill Miller was a good PAO. He understood that it

was valuable for him to have a press attaché who was close to the ambassador, as I think I

was. I kept him abreast of everything that went on in the chancery, and we saw each other

at least once a day. A lesser man might not have enjoyed the fact that one of his

subordinates spent more time with the ambassador than he did.

C: Indian Tendency To Moralize And Criticize America Was And Is Maddening

Q: At this time, of course, Henry Kissinger made his famous statement that, "I guess

we're leaning toward Pakistan." Did that happen while you were there, and did you have

to put up with the reaction to that statement?

SHIRLEY: I don't remember that Kissinger said it, but there was a general feeling in India

that we had a pro-Pakistani bias. I think it was probably right that we did, and I think we

had a pro-Pakistani bias for good reasons, the most public of which was that the Indians

constantly gave us a bad time.

Indians have a tendency to moralize, which at best is irritating and, at worst, maddening. I

remember an incident, and I was very much involved in this, which illustrates the point.

In 1967, the crop had been catastrophic and about 40 million people in Bihar and Uttar

Pradesh were threatened with famine. A congressional delegation came: Congressman

Pogue, who was then Chairman of the House Agricultural Committee; Congressman--

now Senator--Dole; and then-Senator Miller of Iowa. Ambassador Bowles sent Herb

Spivack, the Political Counselor, and me with the delegation to tour the famine-struck

areas. The group returned to the U.S. persuaded that help was needed.

After a long travail, Lyndon Johnson signed off on an agreement to give India ten million

tons of grain. And on that day Indira Gandhi sent a birthday cable to Ho Chi Minh.

Lyndon hit the roof, and justifiably so. Ambassador Bowles had to use every bit of his

considerable political influence in Washington not to have us go back on the agreement.

But it was that kind of thing which made Indians difficult to deal with and which no

doubt contributed to our pro-Pakistan "tilt."

15

Effectiveness And Value Of USIS Indian Program

Q: Yes. I must confess that my own contact with the Indians has been very limited, and

yet it's been enough so that I have almost automatically been irritated with Indian

contacts. I've had a few very good Indian friends, but of all the people's I've encountered,

they probably irritate me more than any other foreign people I know. Do you have any

other observations about your tour in India, or any observations on the general efficacy

of the USIA program there?

SHIRLEY: Yes, much more so than in Italy. Virtually everything the post did in India

was worthwhile.

Q: "Span".

SHIRLEY: Yes. "Span," for instance, was an excellent, widely read magazine. We also

had a good twice-monthly news- paper. The cultural program, at least exhibits and

cultural presentations, that sort of thing, was rather less important, and money spent on

such things was probably wasted. On the other hand, funds for the exchange program

were well handled and yielded good returns.

The USIS post in India had an impact in both the long and short term. We certainly did

everything we could to make known our views through the press, tried to insure that our

views were accurately reflected, and spent a good deal of time working with the Indian

intellectual community.

Q: Well, of course, first of all, the program in India cannot be a mass program in the

usual sense of the word because there is such a vast difference in educational

opportunities for the very low classes in India and the poor, as compared with the more

or less elite. But you really feel that the program that USIS carried out in India did, then,

have a substantial effect upon those people who were in the educated and knowledgeable

class?

SHIRLEY: Yes. I think that it had the effect of bringing to a limited number of people

information and views they otherwise would not have had, or would not have considered.

The role of

Ambassador Bowles in the USIS context was critical, of course. He was an excellent

PAO. The combination of the USIS program, bolstered by the work of an exceptional

ambassador, made a difference.

I might tell you an anecdote.

Stalin's Daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, Defects To U.S. Embassy

One evening I was at the German Embassy at a dinner. One of the house servants came

and called me to the phone. Dick Celeste was on the line and he said that I was to drop

16

my knife and fork and come to the Embassy. I made my excuses and left. I walked into

the Ambassador's office and was told that we had "a walk-in," which was the term we

used to describer a defector. I asked who it was, and was told: "Stalin's daughter."

That was the evening that Svetlana Alliluyeva walked into the Embassy and made a little

bit of history.

We managed to get her out of India the same night, on a Quantas flight to Rome. There

the story broke. I started getting telephone calls from every news organization in the

United States, but I couldn't say anything as we were deep in talks with the Swiss about

obtaining asylum for her there. I could not even say, "no comment," or "I really don't have

anything for you on that," since that would have been tantamount to an admission. For

hours I just had to fake it. I couldn't lie to the press, but I could dissimulate: "What? Can't

hear you. Bad connection," and so on.

Q: I had forgotten. When the story finally broke, was the Swiss connection then

disconnected? Did she go immediately to the United States?

SHIRLEY: No. She stayed in Rome only a few hours, after about twelve hours in the air

from Delhi to Rome. The USG used those hours to negotiate with the Swiss.

A small parenthesis here about good diplomacy. Bowles did not want to put Secretary

Rusk in the position of having to decide what to do with her, so he made the decision for

him. He sent a flash cable to Rusk, but timed it so that he would receive it when Svetlana

was already on the way from the Embassy to the airport. We knew, of course, that from

the arrival of the cable in the Operations Center until the time somebody with sufficient

authority to wake up the Secretary of State could be found, it would be too late for Rusk

to involve himself in the decision. Bowles gave Rusk deniability which he needed since

he was involved at the time in a sensitive negotiation with the Soviets.

Q: How long was she in Switzerland?

SHIRLEY: Six or seven weeks. Then she came to the United States. Since then, she's

been bouncing around.

Q: Well, do you think that pretty well covers your experience in Delhi, then? Do you want

to go on to subsequent activities?

SHIRLEY: I think exhaustively for the unfortunate person who has to listen to this tape.

1969: Return To Washington. Various Positions In Near East, South Asia Area Office

Then (1970) PAO Poland

Q: No, it's all very interesting, and I think it's well to get it on tape. Where did you go

from Delhi, then?

17

SHIRLEY: From Delhi, I went back to Washington, first as Desk Officer for India,

Ceylon, and Nepal, an experience I found not very stimulating. Being a desk officer was

okay, but India had been so exciting, so pleasurable, and I had been so close to

Ambassador Bowles. I had felt that I was doing things that mattered. To then suddenly

find myself writing tedious letters to the PAO about the budget was pretty grim.

Henry Stevens was the Policy Officer in the Near East South Asia area office. Alan Carter

was Area Director, and a very good one. David Nalle was his Deputy. Two very different

people who made a good team. When Henry died -- about four months or so into my

assignment -- I was asked to take on the Policy Officer job. It was preferable to being a

desk officer, but I didn't much enjoy it.

But salvation was at hand. Frank Shakespeare, -- we're now in early 1969 -- went on a trip

in Eastern Europe, and returned unhappy. He wanted changes. He felt that only the

Agency's "best" should serve in that part of the world. At about the same time John

Reinhardt asked whether I wanted to be PAO in South Africa. I was on the verge of

saying yes, when Pic Littell, who was East Europe Soviet Union Area Director, offered

me PAO Warsaw. I plunged into Polish language training for a year, and in July of 1970

went to Poland. Life suddenly became exciting again.

Q: You were there at the beginning of the Solidarity movement then?

SHIRLEY: Oh, no. I arrived in Warsaw in mid-1970. Solidarity didn't really get going

until '78, eight years later. But about six months after we arrived, just a few days before

Christmas 1970, there was an uprising on the Baltic coast. It ended with the

defenestration of Mr. Gomulka and his replacement by Mr. Gierek.

My ambassador was Walter Stoessel, a man whom I greatly admired. Indeed, we

remained great friends until his death. You remember that he was the only Foreign

Service Officer ever to become Deputy Secretary of State.

We had an extraordinarily good Embassy, beginning with the Ambassador. It was also my

first time as CPAO, and I had a good staff. Mike Eisenstadt was my CAO. Ed Harper, a

kind of talented madman, was IO. There were also solid junior officers. Eastern Europe

had always been my primary area of interest, although I also bounced around other parts

of the world. Once in Warsaw, I felt that I was back in an environment in which I could

be more useful than in any previous assignment.

Great Value Of USIS/VOA Work In Poland And Eastern Europe/USSR Generally

Let me generalize for a moment.

I think that the Agency's work in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union -- and I very much

include the work of the Voice of America -- was in every respect more important than

18

anything we did anywhere else in the world. Throughout the 40 years of Soviet

domination it was we -- "we," USIA; "we," VOA and Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty,

the BBC, and Deutsche Welle -- who kept alive in the peoples of those countries the hope

that someday things would change and that the West cared.

Not only was it a matter of providing information, but also of sustaining their hope by

letting them know that we cared enough to broadcast to them, to have exchange programs

with them, to show them exhibits, to talk to them as individuals, to send professors to

their universities, to open libraries in which they could spend happy and profitable hours.

A dollar spent in Eastern Europe was worth a thousand dollars. A dollar spent in many

other parts of the world was worth $10.00 or $1.00, and sometimes only 50 cents.

You asked me earlier how Yugoslavs felt about Americans, and what I said about

Yugoslavs is doubly true of Poles. They are a splendid people, a brave people. The Poles

and Hungarians are cavalry peoples. They have cultures of honor. An ordinary Pole -- if

there are any "ordinary" Poles -- constantly thinks of his honor, of his personal honor, his

national honor, the honor of his wife and the honor of his relatives. And to live among

people who were able so well and so clearly to articulate their hatred for the system which

had been imposed upon them, and who took such extraordinary risks saying things and

doing things that were anathema to the regime, was a constant stimulant. One had to

admire them and one had to believe that what one was doing among them made a

difference.

Q: My brief exposure to them seems to impress me with the fact that they almost don't

give a damn about what they say. If they don't like what they were subjected to within

their own country, they have absolutely no tendency to hold back -- they say it. I don't

know to what extent they do that in Poland, but outside of Poland, they certainly do.

SHIRLEY: They were the same inside Poland. Every Pole understands, viscerally

perhaps, what Mr. Jefferson told us about the need to water the tree of liberty with the

blood of patriots. And Poland, to survive as a nation and as a people, to survive as a

culture, jammed in there as they are between the Russians in the east and the Germans in

the west, has had to sacrifice on the field of battle one generation in every two or three.

And however unreasonable they may sometimes seem, however un-Anglo-Saxon, they

make wise, if desperate, choices. When someone is invading your country with tanks, it

may be foolhardy to charge those tanks with horse cavalry. But if that's all you've got to

charge them with, the Pole feels it's better to do that than to do nothing at all.

Q: My remarks and my question was provoked by the fact that a couple of years ago I

was at a reception in Tokyo at which the Polish ambassador was present. And it was an

experience for me, because the man simply opened up completely about not only the

Soviet Union, which he thoroughly detested, but about his regime within his own country.

19

Here is a man representing his country in a very important other country in the world,

and he had no compunction whatsoever exposing himself to me, as an American, and

giving his opinion of what was happening.

SHIRLEY: This interview is taking place at a time when Eastern Europe, as we have

known it in the post-war era, is coming unraveled. It's important to remember that in

Eastern Europe there were never more but a handful of Marxists and hardly any

communists at all. There were plenty of opportunists, of course, people who went along

just to survive. But they shouldn't be judged harshly.

Q: There were a lot of fascist sympathizers, weren't there?

SHIRLEY: Yes. There were plenty of convinced fascists, not as many as you think, but

too many, to be sure. But of convinced Communists and convinced Marxists, there were

few. The only countries in the world where I have never had arguments or even

conversations, about Marxism, was in Poland and the other Eastern European countries.

They knew that Marxism was nonsense from the moment it was imposed upon them, or at

least a moment or two after it was imposed on them. Indian intellectuals would blather

endlessly about Marxism, but very few Polish intellectuals would risk their dignity

talking about rubbish.

Q: So, again, you feel that when you spoke about what we were able to do, you were

talking about such activities as the exchange program and the exhibit program and all

the three radio stations broadcasting into Eastern Europe; had you then exhausted a

discussion of what you were able to do? Were you able to do anything in the press field

or the publication field in Poland, or was that pretty well restricted?

SHIRLEY: Well, it was much harder than elsewhere, but I had a large circle of press

contacts. I must have seen at least once a month 25 to 35 of the most important Polish

journalists. I seldom saw them in my office. It was almost always in a social situation

created by me.

While we certainly did not influence what the party press wrote, we had a substantial

influence on the way journalists thought, and to some extent, what they thought was

reflected in what they wrote.

To give you an example: There was and is a Catholic weekly in Krakow which

throughout the worst of times was always able to publish, although it was censored. I saw

the editor every few weeks. We provided him with dozens of subscriptions to American

magazines and books for his library. We were fighting the same battle, and fighting it

pretty effectively, as it turned out.

We made a difference in Poland, as I think we did everywhere in Eastern Europe

throughout the Cold War. The people who were in that program can look back -- should

look back -- with the feeling that they did their part and that without them, and others like

20

them in other parts of our government and in Allied governments, things would not have

gone the way they have gone.

1971: Poland Assignment Cut Short At End Of Two Years;

Return To Washington And Deputy Area Director For Eastern Europe,

Then Area Director (1973) and Director Of Recombined East And West Europe (1975)

Q: Do you think now you have covered what you did in Poland, or do you have any

further remarks to make about the Polish situation?

SHIRLEY: No. I probably covered it at too great a length. My tour in Poland was

supposed to have been four years, but at the end of my second year I was asked to come

back to Washington to be Deputy Area Director for Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

I did that job for a year and then succeeded Kempton Jenkins as Area Director. I remained

in that job from 1973 until 1975. In 1975, Jim Keogh, the Director to whom I was

personally closest, asked me to put Western Europe and Eastern Europe and the Soviet

Union back together, and asked also that I become Area Director for the whole shooting

match.

Q: You may remember, I came to see you one time about a question concerning the

consulting firm I was working through, and I thought I remembered at that time that you

were head of EUR, but I had forgotten that that was at a time when they had already

recombined the two.

SHIRLEY: It was, yes. I do remember you came, and, yes, it was 1975.

Q: It may be difficult for you to answer now, since you weren't there at the creation, but

what do you think about the validity of having established a separate European entity for

the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, say, about the time we did, which was around

about 1963, '62 or '63, as I recall?

SHIRLEY: I think it was a sound idea. Operations in Eastern Europe and the Soviet

Union were sufficiently sui generis to justify a separate area office. It was further justified

by the fact that as an independent office it had greater claim on resources and prevented

the big Western European programs from siphoning off funds from where they were the

most needed.

Putting it back together again in 1975 was also right. There was no question in Jim

Keogh's mind that I was going to short change Eastern Europe, because my focus had

been on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Also, somebody needed to take a very

close look at the still badly over-staffed and over-funded Western European Area, and

Jim knew I would do this for him, and do it with gusto.

My first task was to look very closely at the Western European program. As I recall, I

reduced by hundreds our foreign national positions, 80% to 90% of whom we retired. We

21

tried not to perpetrate cruelties on people who had served us well and loyally, many since

1945, but too many things were being done just because they had always been done. And

it was clear that for so long as there were people to do them, things would go on as

before. Virtually the only way to reduce the size of the programs was to reduce the size of

the staffs.

Q: I'll ask you, then, do you have some further comments on the four or five years you

spent within the agency on various stages of the European program direction?

SHIRLEY: My four years as an Area Director coincided with Jim Keogh's tenure as

Director of the Agency, and with Gene Chop’s as Deputy Director. I found them very

agreeable to work for; both are highly intelligent, both are excellent managers, and both

are gentlemen to the core.

You could go to Jim Keogh for a decision and get it on the spot. Both he and Gene had

affection for the Foreign Service, genuine affection. They liked us and we felt it, and I

think we responded to that affection and to that trust by doing our utmost to merit them. I

think that both of them -- each of them slightly differently -- understood the role of USIA

and neither overvalued nor undervalued our role. They did not allow themselves to

believe, as some directors have believed, that they were mini secretaries of state, but they

knew that we had a role to play, and they helped us play it efficiently.

I record my feeling that Jim Keogh was a first-rate director of USIA, and that perhaps

because he is a quiet man, and in some respects a self-effacing man -- he is too proud to

be the other way -- that he is sometimes underestimated. And I would say different, but

equally complimentary things, about Gene Kopp. And I will go on record also to say that

the Agency is extra- ordinarily fortunate to have him back as Deputy Director in this

administration.

Q: So then from the European area . . .

1976: Return To Italy, This Time As PAO

SHIRLEY: From the European area, off I went--or returned, really--for my third tour in

Italy, this time as Country PAO. This was at the beginning of the Carter Administration.

Until this point in my career I had always worked for people whom I respected

professionally, and for many of whom I also had affection. That now changed.

Ambassador Gardner and I did not get along, and the next three years were a miserable

struggle to be loyal to a person for whom I had scant respect. To be fair, I must have been

as much of a trial to him as he was to me.

Curiously enough, some of my better work came in the early stages of that assignment.

22

A. USIS Role In Blocking U.S. Support For Italian Communist Participation In Italian

Government

When the Carter Administration came to office, "Euro- Communism" was fashionable in

Washington. There was a notion, which I thought was deeply wrong, and which I think

events have proved deeply wrong, that if we only cooperated with the European

communists, we would change them, and they would eventually become socialists.

I passionately disagreed with this point of view and thought it terribly dangerous. I

thought that communism in Europe was already receding, including in Italy. I thought that

if we lifted our "veto" for their entry into the government we would have strengthened

them at the very moment they were weakening. I believed that our anathema against them

should continue. I argued fiercely against lifting the anathema.

At this point, the possibility that the communists would enter the government suddenly

loomed large, and Washington finally focused.

The Ambassador suddenly changed his mind, probably because he did not want to be the

person who "lost Italy."

At this point it became easier to fight for a statement which, in effect, would reimpose the

anathema. I drafted a cable to the Department and the NSC which succeeded in

persuading Washington that something needed to be said. On January 12, 1978, a

statement was issued.

It served to block the entry of the communists into the government, which, had they done

so at the time, would have breathed new life into them, and which would have done

untold damage to our interest in Italy.

B. Argument For Giving PAO A Political Counselor Role

Just a couple more quick thoughts about my tour as PAO in Rome. I didn't discover this

in Rome, but certainly the experience there strengthened my view that PAOs, to really do

their jobs well, should also be political counselors with a slightly different mission. The

traditional political counselor's constituencies are the Foreign Ministry in the political

world. The PAO's constituencies are the Fourth Estate and the intellectual world. Each

should relate to those constituencies in essentially the same way.

In most European countries, in most societies in fact, the intellectual world is not what it

is in the United States. I'm talking about how the politicized intelligentsia, has as much,

and in some cases, more influence on the direction in which a given country is going to

go politically than does the political establishment. Thus the PAO's constituency is every

bit as political, in some countries and at some historical moments more so, than the

political counselor's. And what the politicized intelligentsia thinks should be reported on.

23

One of the reasons why departmental officers tend often to regard USIA Foreign Service

officers as second-class citizens is because the USIA officer seldom ever reports on

anything. It's not that he can't. When our people enter our service as young men and

women, they are man for man, woman for woman, every bit as good as State FSOs. But

subsequently they are not asked to use their minds as much, or their skills as much. This

has been a strong trend in recent years when there's been far too much emphasis in USIA

on management, and far too little on substance. Seldom are our people asked to write

anything beyond largely useless reports to Agency administrators.

I have one additional observation, and a final one, because after this, I don't do any more

PAOing: Even though we had looked at the Western European programs carefully, and in

the mid-'70s eliminated many functions which had lingered on from the '40s and the '50s,

there was and there remains a good deal of fat in our West European operations. Which is

not to say that people don't work hard. They do. But many of them are working hard

doing things that are a waste of time and money.

1980: Shirley Called Back To Washington To Be Associate Director For Programs,

But Suddenly Becomes Acting Director Of USIA

But to turn to myself: I was promoted Career Minister in the summer of 1980, and shortly

thereafter John Reinhardt asked whether I wanted to come back to Washington as

Associate Director for Programs to succeed Hal Schneidman, a distinguished USIA

officer who had been the first incumbent in that newly created job in USIA's rather sad,

but happily brief, incarnation as USICA. I was delighted to get out of Rome, and

delighted with the job offer.

My period as Associate Director for Programs was short. Had I remained in that job for a

longer period, I could have done some good. But I had only just begun to work on trying

to understand how to make the organization mesh, how to properly coordinate the

tremendously varied instruments I had in hand when, with the election of Ronald Reagan,

I became Acting Director of USIA.

The six months of being Acting Director was pretty exhilarating. I was the first career

officer to have been formally named Acting Director by a President, and the only one, I

think, who had ever been Acting Director for more than a few days at a time.

I recognized, of course, that as an Acting Director, there were a limited number of

initiatives I could take. I remember -- something I was proud of at the time -- that I

introduced training programs in Marxism for outgoing officers because I felt that most of

our people knew very little about the theoretical side of Marxism, and if they didn't know

anything about Marxism, how were they going to persuade people that it was wrong? I

also set up a course on Western values to try to get our people to think methodically about

our own system.

And many other initiatives as well.

24

Q: I think you said earlier when we were off the record that these were not set up at FSI,

that they were set up and given within the agency. I'm curious. Who was teaching them?

Who did you acquire to impart this knowledge?

SHIRLEY: I don't remember names, but I remember that we went out and got some of the

better people in the country to run them. But I'm certain that we did not do them in the

FSI framework.

1981: Advent Of Charles Wick As USIA Director And Creation Of Position

Of Counselor Of The Agency

Charlie Wick, who was to be the next Director, started coming to his office in April,

about four months into my temporary incumbency.

I found him an interesting, complex and difficult man. He was hard to work for; the

hardest I had ever experienced. For the first year and a half or so of his tenure, he was

extremely suspicious of the "bureaucracy." He was predisposed to believe that whatever

we did was going to be inefficient and resistant of the things that he wanted to do, and

resistant also to the ideas of the new administration. As time went by, he not only became

easier to work with, but he began to rely increasingly on the professional Foreign Service,

although heaven knows he brought far too many political appointees into the Agency.

Looking back on his incumbency, I think it was a mixed blessing. He worked terribly

hard. He believed very strongly in the things he was doing, and about some them he was

right. He certainly got the Agency larger budgets than it otherwise would have had, which

was mostly good, but not altogether good.

After he came on board, Wick asked me to create a job for myself. I looked at the job

description of the Under Secretary for Political Affairs at State. Around it I wrote a job

description for a Counselor of Agency with responsibility for the work of the Area

Directors to assume that the field would get professional supervision, and included some

pretty broad additional authority. About seven or eight months later Mr. Wick decided

that things were not going as he wanted and he asked me to take on additional

responsibility as "Chief of Staff." At that point all of the paper that went to the Director

began to flow through me. Wick generated a flood of memos, but somehow we managed.

I ended up having an Executive Assistant, three Special Assistants, and three secretaries. I

didn't want all that staff, but had to let the office grow to handle the paper flow along with

my other work.

Politicization Of USIA Has Left No Honorable Career Place For A Senior Officer To Go

After Holding Major Agency Assignment; Agency Needs Restructuring

Looking back after many years away from the Agency, and certainly quite a few years

away from 1981 when this job was created, I believe it was the right thing to do. It is my

25

view, and it's a strongly held view, that the officer who becomes Counselor of the Agency

should always be a Career Minister, and should always be at the tail end of his career in

USIA. I believe also that after he ends his tour of duty as Counselor he should not have

another tour in the Agency, and that if he wants to stay in the Foreign Service, it should

be as a chief of mission.

For two reasons. One, because I think Agency officers ought to have at least one job at

the senior-most level to which they can aspire, and which they know will almost certainly

lead to an assignment as chief of mission at the end of their careers. And, two, because I

think that the person in the Counselor's job should be in a position to give his best advice

to the Director of the Agency without in any way feeling that he needs to trim his sails.

My successor as Counselor was Jack Hedges, who, as you know, died before he got his

Mission. Stan Burnett retired out of the job and John Kordek went on to be Ambassador

to Botswana. The present incumbent, Mike Pistor, is still relatively new in the

assignment, but I hope he gets his Mission and refuses another PAOship if that is all he is

offered.

One of the problems USIA has is that the brighter the officer, the more difficult the last

10 to 15 years of his career tend to be. By the time he is 45 or 50, he will have been a

country PAO two or three times. And how many times can you go out as a PAO, working

with State officers whom you knew when they were your juniors and who are now DCMs

and ambassadors? How can you retain your enthusiasm and the will to work in that kind

of situation?

Q: I think the increasing politicization of the agency by which it came to a point where

more political appointees were placed in the most senior and responsible positions, has

left the agency in an untenable position. It's extremely difficult now for a senior USIA

officer to aspire to much of anything in Washington that he thinks in his view is equal to

his talents once he has had two or three major posts within the agency. I don't know what

the answer is. I just don't think it's going to work.

SHIRLEY: The answer has to be that the institution, as it's presently organized, cannot

correct the flaw that you have pointed to. The institution needs to be reorganized. In

essence, a fifth cone in the Foreign Service, a public affairs cone needs to be created, and

interchangeability between that and other cones ought to be considerable. A political cone

officer cannot be fully effective at the senior levels unless he has served a tour or two in a

public affairs capacity. Similarly, a public affairs cone officer cannot be fully effective in

his specialty unless he has served a tour or two as a political officer, an economic officer,

or as a DCM. And unless changes are made to allow for that kind of interchangeability,

the problem will persist.

Q: I think, also, something that you and I discussed a while back when we unfortunately

had the machine turned off, is that I think one of the reasons that Foreign Service officers

in the USIA have not continued along the line of reporting is twofold.

26

One is that there are many ambassadors who are jealous of, and political officers who

would strongly resent that kind of reporting. The other thing is that if you report to the

Agency, the Agency really doesn't know what to do with it once they've got it. So they

don't make it known to State, and if they do, I'm not sure what the reaction of State would

be under the present circumstances and organizational patterns.

I agree with you. Some reorganization and some change has got to take place or there

isn't going to be a major career in the senior area for USIA officers.

SHIRLEY: I certainly agree with the last thing you said, although I'm not sure that I fully

share your view on how ambassadors regard imaginative reporting by USIA officers.

When I was a PAO in Eastern Europe I did a great deal of reporting, straight to the

Department with copies to USIA, and there was never any problem. Neither was there

tension between me and my political officer colleagues, because I was reporting on things

they were not reporting on, and did not have either the intention or the time to report on.

Obviously, a USIA officer should not sit down and write analytical telegrams about the

state of mind of the politicized intelligentsia of country X and then send them back to his

desk at the USIA. The desk officer will merely look at it, perhaps mark it for the Area

Director. And the Area Director will put a note on it and say: "Joe has written an

interesting report." And that will be the end of it. No, that is absurd. But there has always

been a way, in my experience, of reporting to the Department with copies to USIA, or to

USIA with copies to the Department.

Nor do I think that ambassadors are resentful of this sort of thing. In my experience, an

ambassador's main concern is to do his job well and to look good in Washington. If

someone in his Mission is doing reporting which the Department views as valuable, the

ambassador doesn't much care who does the drafting, as long as his Mission looks good.

Q: I guess I have my impression because I served under a couple of ambassadors from

the old school who were upset by it, and I've now been out of the Service for 17 years.

From what you say, things have vastly improved, and I'm glad to hear it.

SHIRLEY: I think they have. Ambassador Stoessel whose PAO I was in 1970-72 in

Warsaw, was considered an old-line Foreign Service officer, and he not only did not

object, but encouraged me and my officers to report. He was also the first superior to

recommend that I one day be a chief of mission. A man of judgement. [Laughter].

1983: Shirley Made Agency Deputy Director Ad Interim

Well, to pick up on my own career, and to say a few things about the next phase: in May

of 1983 Director Wick decided to dispense with the services of then-Deputy Director

Gilbert Robinson, and asked me to become Deputy Director ad interim until he could find

a political appointee replacement. I said that I would, but added that I had no interest in

being the permanent Deputy Director. I served as Deputy Director ad interim for about

27

five months. In the summer of 1983 I asked that I be released by October, as I wished to

retire after a year as a diplomat-in-residence.

The experience of being Deputy Director ad interim was not substantially different from

having been Counselor and Chief of Staff, although my responsibilities were somewhat

enlarged. I became exclusively responsible for personnel decisions, relations with the

Union, and so on. To tell you the truth, after those three years as Acting Director,

Counselor, and Deputy Director, I was tired. Director Wick fired a tremendous number of

people; a revolving door in some of the senior jobs. And, of course, every one of his

crises were accompanied by endless meetings, recriminations, bitterness, anger, slamming

doors and raised voices. There were times when the job was pretty distasteful.

1983: Diplomat-In-Residence At Wesleyan University; Then Ambassador To Tanzania

In October, I went to Wesleyan University as diplomat-in-residence and there taught,

keeping one lecture ahead of my students, a class in the History of Contemporary Eastern

Europe, and a seminar on the political intelligentsia in Eastern European societies. I also

had several tutorials. I enjoyed being at Wesleyan and enjoyed being with young people. I

enjoyed teaching, and I enjoyed the luxury of being able to focus once more on what

really interested me; Eastern Europe. It was a happy time.

Just before I left Washington the Department asked me whether I was interested in

becoming Ambassador to Tanzania. I said that I was. Both my wife and I had always

wanted to serve in Africa, and I had always wanted to have a tour of duty as a chief of

mission.

Q: I know you were hoping for it, but weren't you at one time even considered as

ambassador to Hungary?

SHIRLEY: I was on my way three times, but each time a political appointee went instead.

Q: Is that the time of the famous story, or one of those times of the famous story, when

our bête noire in Congress asked an assistant of his who was a native Hungarian to take

you out and see if you really knew Hungarian?

SHIRLEY: No. That happened while I was Area Director for EE and the Soviet Union; in

1974 or '75. Director Keogh had me up in front of Wayne Hayes defending my budget,

and defending also that slice of the VOA budget attributable to Eastern Europe and the

Soviet Union.

Hayes was in the chair, and there was a huge crowd in the room. I don't really know why.

There must have been many agency officers, but there were a lot of other people too.

Wayne Hayes, as always, was surrounded by a bevy of young women staffers.

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Hayes had had me in the hot seat for more than two hours. He was really working me

over, putting a lot of pressure on me. As I was addressing the question of VOA

broadcasts to Eastern Europe, Hayes said: "Well, Mr. Shirley, I don't understand why

you're asking for money for VOA. Everybody knows that nobody listens to VOA in

Eastern Europe. It's only the RFE that they listen to." I responded by noting that that was

not quite true, that I had recently returned from a trip to the area and had the opportunity

to speak to many people who told me how much they enjoyed, and how valuable they

considered, VOA broadcasts. "I was in Hungary," I continued, "where I had extensive

conversations with Hungarians, and they confirmed this view."

Hayes interrupted me and said that "like all Foreign Service officers," I was claiming to

speak a language which I didn't. He would give me a test because he knew that

"Hungarian was one of the hardest languages in the world."

There was a lot of scurrying around, and one of the hand- maidens dashed out. She

returned with a nice-looking lady in a nurse's uniform who turned out to be a 1956

Hungarian refugee. She hardly had time to get to the desk where I was sitting when

Wayne Hayes said: "I want you to test this fellow's Hungarian, because I bet that he

doesn't speak a word of it." The lady sat down next to me, and I addressed her in

Hungarian. We spoke for perhaps a minute. There was dead silence in the room, and

Hayes, with a look of expectant triumph on his face, asked, "Well, does he?," and the lady

said: "Mr. Chairman, he not only speaks Hungarian, he speaks it better than I do."

[Laughter]

There was a roar in the room and lots of applause.

That's that story. I've heard so many versions told back to me that I thought I had better

set the record straight.

Q: I'm glad to hear it, because I've heard so many versions of it, too, that I wasn't quite

sure what the situation was.

An Aside: Discussion Of Charles Wick's Actions While Director Of USIA

Although this is a little bit out of the sequence and from the subject matter at the time we

were discussing it, I have a question. I hadn't served under Wick because I had gone

considerably before he came on duty, but looking at it from the outside, there were a

number of incidents in which it seemed that the man was simply incredibly naive, if not

incredibly stupid, in what he did.

One of the things that first raised quite a hassle among the alumni and the alumni

association was his speech right after the Grenada invasion when he was up at the Edward

R. Murrow Center for Study--

SHIRLEY: At Fletcher, yes.

29

Q: At Fletcher. And he gave a speech. I can't remember the precise occasion, but in it he

said that it was perfectly all right for the press to be completely excluded from any

coverage of the Grenada invasion because when the national security of the United States

Government was at stake, it was perfectly all right for the government to keep the press

entirely away from any area where they could report on combat operations. That seemed

to me to be slightly out of style for a person who was director of the agency.

There is another case in which he was ridiculed, and I don't know whether the situation

was as bad as it was reported in the press. He was about to make a journey to Japan. He

apparently sent a message ahead which was let out by the embassy over there in which he

asked for a motor escort from Narita Airport into Tokyo. He asked for an armored and

bulletproof glass sedan, he asked for permission to carry his own pistol into Japan, and

I've forgotten one other very odd request that was made. I think he wanted a personal

bodyguard all the time he was there.

SHIRLEY: Wick was neither naive nor stupid. I'm sure he has a very high I.Q. But he

knew little about the world beyond our own borders, or foreign policy, and not much

about managing a large organization. As I said, he worked extremely hard and did some

good things. But he had neither the temperament nor the training, nor the professional

background for the job.

Q: You're on the verge now of going to Tanzania, but before we get there, is there, is

there anything else you'd like to comment on, either with regard to your time as the ad

interim deputy director, or going back even to your period as the diplomat in residence at

Wesleyan?

SHIRLEY: Administration after administration sends political appointees to direct USIA,

to deputy direct USIA, or to occupy important jobs in USIA. A high percentage have no

back-ground to suggest that they will be able to do their jobs. I'm not objecting to political

appointees. That's part of our system, and, in the main, it works. But it works only if

presidents send to departments of government, and to agencies of government, people

who have backgrounds which are a reasonable guarantee that they will be able to handle

their responsibilities. And there shouldn't be too many of them.

USIA has a particular problem, because there's a view among all but a very few

knowledgeable people that USIA is a kind of a glorified public relations agency for the

government, which clearly we are not. USIA was not created to perpetrate acts of social

science. USIA was created to perpetrate political acts. And half of the people who have

been directors of the agency have not understood that simple fact. I expect that Charlie

Wick, for instance, was sent to direct the Agency because it was President Reagan's view

that Wick was going to run the government's public relations agency. USIA ought to be

run by people profoundly experienced in foreign policy. They should be people who have

held senior positions in the foreign policy establishment, people who understand what

kind of work USIA actually does.

30

To criticize Wick for not being a foreign policy expert is unfair, unless one criticizes in

the same breath all the people in Washington, including people on the Hill and in

government, who think that USIA is a public relations agency. USIA will only rarely be

well led because the majority of the people appointed to lead it don't know what they have

got hold of, and don't under- stand what they have got hold of is supposed to do.

Shirley Speaks Of Experiences As Ambassador To Tanzania

Q: I think we've probably pretty well covered now your period of time in USIA, and I

guess you'd like to go on now to your experience as an ambassador in Tanzania. When

you discuss this, not only would I like you to discuss many of the situations that came up

with which you dealt, but also to the extent in which you feel your prior USIA experience

was a value to you as an ambassadorial appointee.

SHIRLEY: A lot of people who have been ambassadors will tell you that being one is not

everything it is cracked up to be. I differ. I think being ambassador is great fun. I liked

being in charge. I liked having all the elements of the embassy working for me, and I

enjoyed the fact that I had to think about AID problems, and Peace Corps problems, and

other sorts of problems that I had not been asked to confront in the past.

I enjoyed the fact that during my tenure in Dar es Salaam Julius Nyerere was still

President of Tanzania. I found him an interesting and extremely intelligent man. And

since South Africa was in turmoil at the time, and because Nyerere was, to say the least,

not particularly sympathetic to the policy of constructive engagement, my meetings with

him were frequent, animated, sometimes sharp, but never acrimonious. It was as

intellectually stimulating to deal with him, as it was to deal with Prime Minister Salim

Salim.

Did my experience as USIA officer help me be a better chief of mission? Insofar as I was

a good chief of mission at all, yes. A USIA Foreign Service officer who has had senior

assignments abroad in USIA, and senior assignments in the Agency, is as well prepared to

be a chief of mission as a political cone ambassador. If he is an intelligent man, a

thoughtful man, a well-read man, if he knows history, and if he is a political animal, the

USIA officer is as prepared to be a good chief of mission as the fellow who has spent his

entire life in the political cone. In some respects, he is better prepared because he will

have managed large amounts of money and large numbers of people, whereas plenty of

political cone officers become ambassadors with virtually no management experience at

all.

Q: While you were dealing with Nyerere, what language were you dealing with? French?

SHIRLEY: No. Nyerere's English was every bit as good as mine. He had been educated at

the University of Edinburgh.

31

Shirley Outlines Views On How USIA And State Should Be Restructured And Operate In

Future

Q: When we started this interview, you indicated that you felt perhaps that USIA had

reached a point in history where it ought to be broken up into its constituent parts and

put under different jurisdictions. Would you mind giving a few moments on how you feel

about this and why you feel that way?

SHIRLEY: I feel that way because I don't think the institution as it is now constituted

performs its job as well as it would if it were organized in a different way.

I think the Voice of America ought to be given a status much closer to that of RFE/RL.

USIA never has had much control over VOA except in extreme situations. VOA

subordination to USIA is really a sham, and that sort of pretense isn't healthy. It would be

better to stop pretending, and give VOA a Board and a dotted line to the Secretary of

State.

The cultural affairs side of the house ought to stay in a successor agency to USIA. It could

be called the U.S. Cultural Agency, or something like that. All of those functions which

today are performed in the Educational and Exchanges Bureau, and many of the functions

of the Bureau of Programs, should go to the successor agency. The press and information

side of the house should in its entirety be moved into the Department.

For this to work efficiently, the Department would have to reorganize itself. It would be

necessary to create a position which could be called Under Secretary for Public Affairs,

and you would need also an Assistant Secretary for Press and Information Affairs. The

Under Secretary for Public Affairs would have some responsibilities for the activities of

the Cultural Agency, and it would be to him that the Director of the Cultural Agency

reports, not to the Secretary of State.

I would eliminate the position of public affairs officer, and I would have instead press

counselors, or press and information counselors, and cultural counselors, each reporting

separately and as coequals to the DCM. And I envisage the press counselor's

responsibilities very much as I described them earlier -- the PAO as a second political

counselor. The cultural counselor's responsibilities would be no different from those of a

cultural attaché's today.

Overseas it would be easy to do. Doing it in Washington would be harder, but I think that

for the press and information side of the house to be effective, it is imperative that it be

closer physically and intellectually to the place where foreign policy is articulated.

Q: Well, I don't want to take up time to argue some of these points on tape. I have some

reservation about how the information side might act under the State Department, I

suppose because I was in the predecessor agencies of USIA when they were under the

32

State Department. I think a lot of what we were able to do abroad only became possible

when USIA got out from under the strictures of the Department.

Maybe it will be different today. We're 30 years past that time. But that's my own feeling.

However, I wanted to get your opinion on tape, and I'll try to get a little (unclear).

SHIRLEY: I don't underestimate the difficulty of doing what I have suggested, and I do

not think that it would work unless the Department reformed itself at the same time that

USIA was taken apart. The likelihood of any of this happening is very small. Chances are

that we're going to continue with the present structure for quite some time.

I do hope that even without institutional reform, the Agency will look at itself carefully. It

needs to de-bureaucratize if it is going to be as vital as it once was. This is not a comment

on our people, on their training, or on their dedication. But the Agency has tied itself into

such knots that it no longer has the flexibility which at one time was its greatest strength.

USIA begins to look like any other gray, tired, Washington bureaucracy, and that is

saddening.

Q: Yes, I find it very sad. I think that the arrangement as it was under Ed Murrow, when I

could call in and be in his office within minutes and discuss anything I wanted to with

him is no more. Any officer has to act bureaucratically even to see the director in these

days.

Well, thank you very much for the interview, Jock. As we said before, we kind of passed

over some of your experiences as the director of the East European and ultimately the

combined European program. I hope that when you get the transcript of this interview,

you will be able to put back into it some of the things that we happened to pass over. If

you think of additional factors that ought to be on there, you can add them when you get

the transcript, assuming you have time with this aid to Poland responsibility to manage.

Thank you again.

SHIRLEY: It was a pleasure, Lew. Thank you.

End of interview